Steamlust (23 page)

“Makes you grateful for diamond-based steam engines, doesn’t it?” I remarked. “No coal smog to obscure the heavens.”

“It’s miraculous,” Sam said, and I thought he was talking about the view until he kept speaking. “How on earth does it survive hailstorms, or snow?”

“It’s far stronger than it looks,” I told him.

He was looking at me when he answered, in a thoughtful voice, “Yes, I believe you’re right.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at his awkward attempt at sentiment. He meant well, after all. “You seem to appreciate innovative engineering feats.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Sam answered with a cocky smile.

“Just so long as you don’t try to couple with my roof when we’re done,” I countered, deadpan. “I don’t mind if you gaze at it adoringly while I ride you, though.”

Sam blinked in surprise. “Here?”

I shrugged. “It’s the only place that’s mine.”

“But where do you go at night?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes I stay here. There’s always more work to do. Sometimes I walk—this city is so full of beauty and strangeness and wild dreams. Iridescent little aluminum dragonflies that hum songs from the radio so passersby hear them and want to buy them on phonograph. Flashbulb fireworks in the sky to help the sailors see the tower-tops without sun.

“Sometimes I go to see the seamstress. The one who…my owner, before. She had good insurance. After the robbery she was able to buy new automatons. I visit her, and I visit them. I help with the sewing sometimes. They remind me of…a long time ago.”

“Visiting Mama and the little sisters back home. You’re more like us humans than even the Liberators think.”

“Help me with this?” I began undoing the buttons down the front of my dress, tiny pearl nubs beginning at the high collar of my dark bodice and leading down to the nipped waist. The long skirt was embroidered with constellations of the zodiac in bronze and cherry-red thread against the crisp black of the linen. It was a modern, frivolous design. I’d commissioned it at the girls’ insistence—if my workshop crew had their way, I’d be a fashion plate who spent every waking moment looking for her next lover.

They’d all be delighted, if they knew Sam’s deft, tanned fingers were working each of the silly buttons on the silly dress open one by one. Too bad for the girls that I’ve never been the kind to gossip.

All that kept Sam’s skin and mine from touching as he carefully opened the front of my dress was the whisper-thin muslin of my slip and the long dusty-rose velvet ribbon around my neck, with my key threaded on it.

“No corset?” His tone was appreciative. Only a few buttons left until he’d be finished. I started work on the worn-in olive tweed waistcoat Sam wore, the fabric imbued with the scents of the wind.

“The way I’m built, I don’t need one,” I told him. He smirked.

“That’s true enough,” he replied, resting one of his hands against the flat of my belly, over the remaining pearl buttons. Frustrated, I pushed his hands away and finished the job myself.

“You don’t need to flirt like that,” I told him in a curt voice. “You don’t need to joke.”

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the key lying against my
skin just above the swell of my breasts. After a moment’s deliberation, I nodded. I wouldn’t need winding for several more weeks, at least, but I’m not ignorant about the erotic aspects of the act.

I slipped the slim ribbon up over my head and dropped it into his palm, lifting my hair away from the back of my neck and turning so he could easily see the keyhole. He slotted the key in place carefully and gave it three slow, careful turns.

I could feel the coils and springs in my belly tighten with each movement of the key, the tension making me more aware of every part of myself, of every sensor and artificial nerve in my skin. I pulled off my lambskin gloves, turning to face Sam and taking his face in my hands as I leaned in to kiss him.

Knowledge of his body filled my mind—the aroused racing of his heart, the flush of want under his skin. The slight sunburn on the back of his neck, the good quality of his knee-high leather boots and the good posture they gave him.

“Your compass is in working order again, by the way,” I told him when we broke apart from the kiss.

“When I have my permits, I’ll show you and your girls the skies,” he promised me.

As we removed the rest of our clothes Sam found and worshipped each small part of me, the neatly stitched seams hidden at the joints of my thighs, the exposed hinges of my fingers. I tasted each of his scars, the little marks and survived wounds of a well-lived young human life.

I could taste his pulse, the electricity of his existence, on my tongue again when I sucked at his neck. My thighs were straddling his lap, and I knew that I’d be able to follow his heartbeat while I sucked his cock later, when he’d caught his breath and was ready for another round. Automatons don’t have the same problems with exhaustion as humans do.

For now I needed him inside of me more than anything. I ached with it, every refashioned ratchet wheel and suspension spring inside me wound so tight I felt as if I’d shatter if I went another moment without being touched.

I arched in closer, urging his face down toward my breast. The flat, thin edge of his teeth grazed the nipple, barely a touch, and I felt so open and ready for him that I think I moaned aloud. He shifted his hips, lifting me up and then down, and then we were locked together, parts in perfect mechanism.

I was going to fly apart, like an incomplete clockwork knocked off the edge of a table, sending gleaming pieces in all directions. I couldn’t cope with something so good, not unless I had something solid to grasp and ride through it. I rocked up, experimentally, letting him almost slip free as I clenched and held him in. The push back down made his length stroke the upper wall inside me, and I felt a wave of sensation shudder through me.

“You feel like silk,” Sam whispered, his breath hitching in damp gasps against my throat. I brought myself up again and then down.

“You feel like life,” I answered, as we moved together under the jewel colors of the sky beyond the workshop. A smuggler and a clockwork girl, in a glass room built to fix a broken world.

V
iolet takes a steamcab to the dirty end of town. She suspects the driver is taking her on a tortuous, inventive route, but she doesn’t mind as much as she should. She likes these dark, narrow streets, the pockets of decrepit and dangerous buildings populated by fiends and outlaws. In addition, she herself is up to much the same kind of misadventure. This whole trip, in fact, is part of a tortuous, inventive route to increase her personal gain. Her very personal gain.

She raps on the ceiling.

“Here will do,” she calls, over the hissing of the pistons. The wheels grind to a halt against the cobbles. She’s on the corner of Trongate, could almost be visiting a hat shop, looking for a suitable frippery to wear to her next afternoon garden party—if she weren’t dressed in rather unusually somber clothing and if she were not draped with a dark, voluminous cloak of thick velvet.

“Tenner,” said the driver, turning to spit into the gutter.

“That’s outrageous,” she said.

“My usual rate for such a precious cargo. Sir Catter wouldn’t like to think his daughter were bein’ carried round by some fly-by-night villain, now would he? ’Specially in these parts of town. A woman needs lookin’ after round here, don’t she?”

He leered at her with a mouth full of broken teeth.

Violet passed him the note, her fingertips feeling greasy although she didn’t touch his grubby mittens.

Once the cab had spluttered along the street and was lost among the afternoon traffic, Violet slid down the alley between the baker’s and the music hall. The smell of hot bread made her mouth water, as it always did. Or perhaps it was anticipation of another sort.

The door was heavy, but Violet had learned the trick. With one sharp kick of her leather boot, it sprang in the hinges and gave enough that she could tug it open. She lifted the cape to cover her face. The smells down here were of the night soil variety—thick enough to make you retch.

The lift was a fearsome cage—rusted so thick that it appeared made out of dried mud. Flakes of old paint came away on her glove when she closed the doors behind her. She swallowed her fear. Four floors, she said to herself, pulling the lever to raise the lift upward. The higher she rose, the more lightheaded she felt. Her palms were damp, and she rubbed them against the soft fur of the cape.

He knew she was coming. Of course he knew. Would he be waiting for her? Automatically, she reached to her face and buried her hand in the wild black frizz of her hair. She drew her shoulders back and watched the floors roll slowly past outside the crisscross lift bars. Something clicked as she rose higher: A cog complaining of the strain. Cables stretched to their breaking point.

Violet closed her eyes.

The lift drew to a halt. She got out and arranged her skirts before ringing the bell.

“Hello,” he said, pulling open the studio door.

“You were expecting me.”

“Of course.” He stood watching her. His—she didn’t know exactly what to call it—his machine hand, the prosthesis, gripped the door frame.

“It is cold out here, sir.”

“Come in, come in.” At once, he flung open the door and turned to the dim chaos of his studio. Violet followed with as much dignity as she could muster, even though her knees felt horribly like they were not connected to the rest of her. As if she were cobbled together, like Gustav, a broken person who’d been remade and was now something other than entirely human.

“Care for a drink?” he threw the question over his shoulder.

“Yes.” She needed something sharp.

Gustav lived like a wild animal. His workshop was also his home. Violet had been shocked, on her first visit, to see a heap of blankets and animal skins tumbled in a corner, disheveled and obviously recently slept in. Women like her were not raised to visit the sleeping quarters of males. The sight of Gustav’s bedsheets was enough to make her cheeks burn. But Gustav laughed when she blushed, and now, after two subsequent trips out here to Hell’s western outpost, she had taught herself to ignore the depraved manner in which the man chose to live.

“I’ve made some modifications,” Gustav said as he reappeared and handed her a shot glass. “I think you’ll be pleased.”

“I know what I want.”

“And you are all the more admirable for it.” Gustav said. He raised his glass to her. When he threw back his drink, Violet’s
treacherous gaze hooked onto his throat, the jut of his Adam’s apple. Her eyes slid inexorably down, toward the second, more shadowy jut, the slight protuberance at his crotch. It wasn’t the first time she’d been secretly fascinated by the workings of a man’s body. Only Gustav’s seemed, somehow, so much more… vivid than those of other men.

“Unusual,” Gustav said. Violet’s eyes jerked up to meet his. She swallowed, and tasted the fumes of whatever potcheen he’d just served her.

“What is?” she asked.

“A woman who has the gall to demand what she wants. But then, you are born to a family that is used to doing whatever it pleases.”

“I’d be grateful if you would not mention my family,” Violet said. “While I’m here, I’m your employer, not anybody’s daughter. Is that clear?”

Gustav stared at her.

“You’ve been amply rewarded for your compliance,” Violet continued. “It would be wise not to forget that.”

“And it would be wise of you to learn not to try to buy someone’s loyalty,” Gustav said, his voice low.

“I beg your pardon?” Violet clutched her glass. Somehow, it was empty. Her mouth was burning dry.

Gustav didn’t answer. Instead, he set his glass down with a click and moved toward the bench in the center of his studio. The table was strewn with detritus, piled high with spanners and cutters and hammers and glass tubes, all discarded over scribbled plans and intricate drawings. Gustav abandoned projects when his attention was drawn to something else, the newest, ever more exciting inventions that his brilliant, daring mind came up with. Here and there among the rubble, there were tiny marvels. Violet noticed a clockwork bird, its feathers
minutely engraved and its one wing perfectly constructed. She knew without asking that it was a working model; that it would fly if it were ever finished.

Because Gustav was a genius. It was how she’d heard of him, all those stories the servants retold in backrooms when they thought none of the gentry were listening. The outraged claims of her married lady friends, the hotly whispered secrets. What she’d overheard. How he’d fought as a young man, in the Clockwork Revolution, and nearly been killed. And how he’d rebuilt himself. A firebrand beholden to no one, living on the edge of society, building his awful toys for the idle rich.

“I think you’ll find it still fulfills your demands,” Gustav said. His voice was flat now, like any servant’s. His face turned away, Gustav pulled the tarpaulin from the lurking shape in the center of the room.

The chair was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Anyone would be taken with the skill of the carving, the finely wrought detail on the headrest, the way the wooden spindles virtually melted into the metal. The seams were invisible. It looked almost as though it were something alive. Violet’s mouth watered as she ran her eyes over the curves of it. In particular, she lingered on the special additions, the hidden components that made the “fainting chair” such a very special piece of art.

“Rather wonderful, isn’t it?” Gustav said. His hand stroked the undulating backrest, as if it were the shoulder of a friend. “I’ve grown quite attached.” With this, he held out his hand—not the flesh and blood hand, but the other one, his wire and steel simulacrum.

Violet hesitated for a fraction of a second. Long enough for a shadow to pass over his eyes.